Road traffic congestion may be particularly problematic in older cities, such as London or Moscow, where the road system was designed long before the advent of automobiles. Road traffic congestion may also be particularly problematic in newer cities, such as New York, that have a dense road network and a very large amount of vehicles using the roads. In either case, in such cities, it is not just the highways that are affected by traffic congestion. Many of the cities' primary, secondary, and tertiary (non-highway) streets may be affected as well. In some cities it is common for large areas of the city's streets to become so congested during various times of the day that gridlock or near gridlock occurs. Unfortunately, while some of the times of such congestion occurring are predictable (e.g. “rush hours”), other times they are not. Similarly, while some of the areas of the city in which such congestion will occur are predictable, others are not. Variation in traffic congestion (timing and location) occurs in a somewhat unpredictable manner from day to day.
As traffic congestion can be unpleasant, inefficient, and wasteful; ideally people would avoid areas in which the traffic is congested if possible. Accordingly, there are many conventional traffic predicting and/or reporting systems that are known in the art. Typically the output of such systems is a map, such as that on the Moscow traffic web page of the Yandex™ website (www.yandex.ru), in which the road network of a given area (in this case Moscow) is shown with various segments of the road network being colored. Typically the color of a segment indicates the level of traffic congestion on that segment, either then currently or as a prediction of some time in the future. In the case of the Yandex map referred to above, the map shows then current traffic congestion in respect of the Moscow road network. As is commonly the case in such systems, red road segments on the map indicate heavy traffic congestion on that road segment, yellow road segments on the map indicate light traffic congestion on that road segment, and green road segments on the map indicate no traffic congestion on that road segment.
While conventional traffic predicting and/or reporting systems such as that described above are adequate for their intended purposes, additional improvements are possible and might be useful in certain circumstances.